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Theatre History and Historiography: A Disciplinary Mandate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2004

Thomas Postlewait
Thomas Postlewait
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

Historical scholarship, despite the many changes in methodologies and models over the years, is one of the abiding missions of the discipline of theatre studies: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday, as is well known, Theaterwissenschaft was the foundational methodology for scholarship and doctoral education. Today, of course, our approaches to theatre history encompass several dozen research methodologies and analytical models. And tomorrow? Will cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories still provide a reliable foundation? Or will we develop fields of investigation and modes of analysis that draw upon new ideas in psychology, neuroscience, and biology? One thing is clear: our methods and models will continue to change.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , November 2004 , pp. 181 - 188
Copyright
© 2004 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.

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Footnotes

Thomas Postlewait, Professor of Theatre History at Ohio State University, is a past president of ASTR. He is editor of the series Studies in Theatre History and Culture (University of Iowa Press), and he writes on British and American theatre history. Recently he published Theatricality (Cambridge University Press), coedited with Tracy C. Davis. Forthcoming books: An Introduction to Theatre Historiography (Cambridge) and The Correspondence of Bernard Shaw and William Archer (Toronto).